Brandeis U gets $8.4m from man who visited once

Brandeis University has received an $8.4 million bequest gift for social-justice initiatives from a man who visited the campus one time.

The university announced the gift from Seymour Bluestone on Tuesday. Bluestone, a former rehabilitation doctor who visited Brandeis just once, but felt a strong connection to its social-justice values, died in September at the age of 96.

Bluestone, who had lived in Clearwater, Florida, began making small gifts to Brandeis in the 1990s at the request of family friends. He visited the campus in 2000, where he learned about a number of Brandeis programs. Over lunch, he and Prof. Laurence Simon, the founding director of the Sustainable International Development program at the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, began a discussion about poverty and other global issues which remained with him.

— JTA